


A Thousand Little Prisms

by Felle_DesignWorks (Felle)



Category: RWBY
Genre: F/F, Post-Volume 5 (RWBY)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-23
Updated: 2019-12-23
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:07:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21909433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Felle/pseuds/Felle_DesignWorks
Summary: Immediately after the battle of Haven, Weiss knows she ought to be reveling in the fact that she's still alive—but instead all she can think of is her old prep school classmate, suddenly reappearing after vanishing from Atlas years ago.
Relationships: Ilia Amitola/Weiss Schnee
Comments: 7
Kudos: 145





	A Thousand Little Prisms

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Loriela](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Loriela/gifts).



Weiss was reasonably certain that the Mistral bar they had all piled into an hour before wasn’t allowed to serve people their age. She took another sip of her drink and shivered as it burned its way down her throat. Saving the capital came with a few perks. A moment’s respite before they had to press on, had to keep throwing themselves in harm’s way. She breathed deep, caught an underlying whiff of smoke. Ran the tip of one finger around the rim of her glass. Looked at the other end of the bar.

At her. At Ilia.

Her stomach flipped, and not from the alcohol. That they would run into one another again, here and now, so far from Atlas and after all these years…she quickly downed the rest of her drink. Before she could do anything else, Yang reached over and smacked the empty glass on the bar. “Another one over here!”

“I shouldn’t,” Weiss said, but made no motion to wave the bartender away when he brought another drink. Her third in an hour. She swirled the glass until her reflection in the amber liquid blurred. “We don’t all burn off alcohol like you do, you know. Some of us have to think about hangovers.”

“Hey, we get to be heroes tonight, it’d be wrong not to enjoy it. And besides, if anyone needs this, it’s you. You…”

Yang motioned vaguely to the spot on her side where the lance had broken through her skin. She hadn’t gone back to the house to change, leaving two bloodied puncture holes in her dress over the healed wound. “Don’t be melodramatic, Yang. It’s not as if I _died_ or anything like that.”

“All the more reason to celebrate!”

She was already sauced, Weiss saw. No one would take their money and Yang had clearly capitalized on that, with a little pyramid of empty glasses in front of her to show how she was drinking the place dry. Not that she couldn’t use it. Yang’s night had been just as unpleasant.

“You’ll celebrate right off that stool and onto the floor if we let you,” Blake said, stepping in between them. Yang scoffed and belted back another round in defiance while Blake sidled a bit closer to Weiss. She added, in a lower voice that was almost drowned out by all the noise around them, “You know you can’t talk to her from the bottom of your glass, right?”

Weiss felt her face coloring as she sat up straight and looked at Blake, looked at the knowing half-smile she was wearing. Was it even worth denying? Pleading ignorance? Blake had to be as drunk as any of them, she might have been blowing smoke. It was still possible to salvage this, as long as she did nothing to make Blake remember this conversation—

“I don’t think I could talk to her from anywhere.” Weiss cursed inwardly and turned back to the bar. Ilia was in the middle of a rather intense arm wrestling competition with Sun—winning—with a single half-finished drink in front of her.

“Why?”

“You must have hit your head in Menagerie…you know who I am. Who my family is.” Weiss picked up her glass, but set it down without another sip. “What could I even say? ‘Hey Ilia, long time no see, remember Siren Prep? Or the company my father runs with what amounts to Faunus slave labor? Can I buy you a drink?’”

Blake tapped her chin thoughtfully. “Maybe don’t _lead_ with that. I think she knows already.”

“She knows. They all know. The only reason I’m not getting death glares from half the bar is because we’re all thankful to be alive.”

“Yeah. Yeah.” Blake looked out over the room, folding her arms over her chest. Weiss cocked an eyebrow. When had she gotten so confident? “It couldn’t be because you walked away from all of that, at serious risk to yourself. Or because I may have said that you definitely don’t toe the company line…our rocky start notwithstanding.”

Weiss’s face flushed a deeper red at the memory. “I appreciate you making it plain. You didn’t need to do that.”

“And _you_ don’t need to go and talk to Ilia.” She squeezed Weiss’s shoulder and leaned closer. “But you should. Because someone else will, if you don’t.”

She looked pointedly across the bar, where one of the rabbit Faunus girls who had come in with the reformed White Fang was chatting up Ilia, laughing, lightly touching her bare arm. Weiss rolled her tongue between her teeth. She was on the verge of slamming her drink for the extra bit of confidence when she thought better of it and stood up from her stool. Blake offered an encouraging wink and sat down beside Yang as Weiss shuffled through the wall of people in the packed bar to get to the other side.

Once she was free of the throng, she grabbed a half-empty mug left unattended on the bar to make it look like she was simply wandering over rather than just trying to stake a claim. Ilia and the girl were still talking, laughing, getting closer bit by bit. Weiss shifted her weight back and forth, trying to come up with something, _anything_ , that might give her an in here. She looked back down the bar and saw someone’s drink release a sudden puff of smoke. Perfect.

“Hi, Ilia!” Weiss said brightly, sidling up to the two of them. She made sure to edger herself ever so closer to Ilia than the rabbit Faunus. The skin around Ilia’s ears and cheeks flashed pink for a moment. “How long has it been?”

“Weiss? Right, Blake said you were here…three, four years, I think? Whenever I left Siren. I heard you got speared in the fight or something? One of your old classmates fixed you up?”

Her eyes tracked downward to the bloodied hole in Weiss’s gown. “Yeah, any fight has risks and whatnot,” she said, trying to blow off her near-death experience and refocus the conversation. “It would’ve been a lot worse if that central tower came down on top of us. And I hear we have you to thank for defusing the bombs. So, you know, thanks.”

“Sure, you’re welcome. Better for everyone this way.”

Weiss could only keep this smile silently plastered on her face for so long. Ilia took a sip of her drink and started to go back to her previous conversation. She simply couldn’t allow that to happen. It would waste a perfectly good opener. “So they were probably, what, Ochre Demo five eighty-five blasting charges? I bet they were from Ochre, so much of their inventory gets ‘lost’ and winds up on the black market.” Ilia cocked her head and brought her coloration back to normal. Weiss could hear herself rattling off information that was hardly fit for flirting, but she didn’t seem to be able to stop. “Plus they have those completely unsecure detonators so you can bind them to a scroll app, so unsafe, right? But at least the fuse box is only behind a panel, so you can get a pair of snips in there pretty easily. I always thought that was cheap and insecure…funny how these things dovetail.”

“I didn’t really look at the brand name when I was disarming them. We were actually in the middle of—” Ilia looked over Weiss’s shoulder, but her drinking partner had melted back into the crowd, leaving them packed between two groups of patrons. She groaned and flashed a bright red around her shoulders and neck before turning a glare on Weiss. It was intense, withering—vaguely exciting. Weiss felt her ears flush. “Can you not read a mood, Schnee? I was making good progress there.”

“Oh, you were? Sorry.” She didn’t _feel_ very sorry. “I, um…just wanted to talk to you. No one knew what happened to you after you left Siren, and now here you are. Funny, isn’t it?”

“I guess. I know I didn’t expect to see you again. Not on the same side, anyway.”

Ilia slumped in her seat and rubbed at one temple. Her glare had melted away, and her free hand was shaking beside her glass. “Are you all right?” Weiss asked.

“Think the night’s catching up with me. I’m not used to pitched fights like that, I usually work behind the scenes. And it’s _really_ loud in here.”

It was, and the atmosphere wasn’t helped by the warmth from so many bodies and the way the alcohol made every list slightly to the left. Weiss pointed out the back section. “There are some quieter tables back there.”

“You don’t need to go and try to make up for cutting in on that moment,” Ilia said. “I’ll live. You don’t have to chat me up out of charity or anything.”

“I’m not here to be charitable!” Weiss said, louder than she intended.

“Then why are you?”

“Because I wanted to be the one flirting with you!” Weiss said, _much_ louder than she intended.

She put her pilfered drink down and clapped her hand over her mouth, but Ilia’s eyes were already widening. No unringing that bell. The freckles on Ilia’s cheeks cycled through several colors before settling on a bright red, almost pink. Weiss imagined her own face was much the same. They looked everywhere but at each other for several moments, before Ilia grabbed Weiss’s wrist and pulled her to the quieter part of the building, behind the bar where the private tables were set up. She led Weiss to a small corner table, barely large enough for the two of them to sit without pushing up against one another. “Explain,” Ilia said, “because I know I’m still sober enough that I heard you properly.”

Weiss wanted nothing more than to melt into an insensate puddle right there and then. When that failed to happen, she felt a desperate urge to drink herself to incoherence. That, too, failed to materialize. She took a long, deep breath in a final bid to see if something would happen that demanded their attention. Nothing.

“I just…I already said it, didn’t I? I wanted to be the one flirting with you. Touching your arm. Making you laugh. I never had the chance at Siren, I didn’t want to miss the opportunity twice.” It felt like she had to force every word past a painful lump in her throat, but stopping didn’t occur to her. “I’m sorry I ruined your moment there, but I was…you know, jealous.”

Weiss was intensely aware of the way her knee was bumping into Ilia’s. She seemed to notice it as well, since she shifted in place—but didn’t actually move away, though she had a small sliver of seat on her other side. “You were jealous,” Ilia said.

“Yes.”

“Of that girl.”

“Yes.”

“Because you wanted to be the one flirting with me.”

“Is the blow-by-blow recap really necessary? We were both there. We know what I said.”

“You’ll understand if it takes some processing, won’t you, _Schnee_?” Ilia asked, leaning slightly toward her. “I know Blake said you had changed, but not this much. You don’t need to flirt with me or anything to prove you’re not like your father—”

“This has nothing to do with my family or the fact that you’re a Faunus,” Weiss said indignantly. Why did everyone assume that she was some kind of carbon copy of that waste of space? “I was nursing that crush at Siren well before I knew you were, it has nothing to do with that.”

She realized, too late, that she had said more than she intended to. Weiss tried shrinking into her seat, to no avail. Ilia straightened up and stared down into her lap. “You had a crush on me too, huh?”

“Of course, you’re—wait, what do you mean, _too_?”

Ilia turned pink again. Oh.

Oh.

The world seemed to undergo a slight but noticeable shift, localized entirely to their little table in the back of an overcrowded bar so far from home. Weiss opened her mouth several times to say something, but the words refused to form until she finally rallied them and pushed through.

“But you _did_ know who I was,” Weiss said, carefully measuring each word. “You knew. You had both sides of the story. And…not that I’m not flattered, but…why me?”

Ilia tugged at the end of her ponytail and smoothed it out. “Sometimes you can’t help these things. Or what kind of tawdry Vallan romance novels you get a hold of and their fixation on forbidden love. Maybe because it was safe, in a way? Nothing was ever an actual possibility, so I didn’t have to worry about being rejected. I could just look at you from afar and pine. We want what we can’t have. I don’t know. I had some self-destructive tendencies back then.”

Weiss nodded. Her reasoning was somewhat deranged, but there was a thin trail of logic running through it. She drummed at the table, wishing she still had a drink in her hand to sip and give herself a moment to collect her thoughts, but there was no such respite. Ilia glanced up at her for a moment before staring at her lap again. Maybe it was something in the way Ilia looked at her, or the alcohol playing havoc with her inhibitions, but Weiss asked, “Do you want to do something self-destructive now?”

The words sounded like they were coming from someone else borrowing her voice. Ilia laughed humorlessly before it registered, at which point her whole body flashed through the rainbow twice. She sucked in a sharp breath. Weiss was a little hazy, but she definitely saw that. “Are you trying to get a rise out of me?” Ilia asked. Her throat sounded dry.

“I wouldn’t have said anything tonight—done anything—if I didn’t still have feelings for you,” Weiss said, shifting a little closer in the booth until they were touching. Wherever she was channeling all this confidence from, she hoped it wouldn’t stop now. Ilia’s cheeks colored with a blush rather than her changing her skin. “I don’t think you would have, either.”

“Guess not…”

They leaned a little closer. Her skin was so lovely up close, Weiss saw, with faint ripples of color moving constantly like pinpricks of light being passed through a thousand little prisms. And her lips, so close…it would be trivial to lean in a bit more—

“Yeah! Get it, ice queen!”

“Yang, shut up!”

Weiss growled in annoyance and looked toward the bar, where the rest of her team had their heads poking out from behind a wall, trying to be inconspicuous. Trying, and reaching the usual level of success whenever Yang and Ruby were involved. “I see where you learned to ruin a moment,” Ilia said, reluctantly easing back. “Um, do you want to go somewhere else?”

“Yeah…we’re staying at a place nearby. And we can _go there alone_.” She looked right at a snickering Yang as she added that, then turned back to Ilia. “If that’s all right with you, that is.”

Ilia’s answer was to shuffle out of the booth and then offer Weiss her hand to help her follow. They very pointedly ignored the rest of Weiss’s team, plus Sun, and their whistles and various other sounds of encouragement as they moved to the door and stepped out onto the street. Ilia shivered. “It’s so cold in Mistral,” she said, and pressed herself to Weiss’s side. She didn’t feel that cold. Weiss didn’t say that.

The house was mercifully empty when they arrived, with everyone else still out celebrating. “Would you like tea? A watercress sandwich?” Weiss asked. Ilia raised an eyebrow. “Sorry. Habit. My room’s up the stairs, so…”

Once they were in her room, Weiss shut and locked the door, then put a warding glyph on it for good measure. They set their swords aside and gravitated toward the bed. Weiss’s heart was pounding. Was this really happening? Could she be sure that it wasn’t some fever dream that her mind had conjured up in response to the trauma?

Well, real or not, there was no point in wasting the opportunity. She took a step closer to Ilia and tucked a lock of loose hair behind her ear before letting her fingers ghost down Ilia’s cheek. No interruptions, no distractions. “May I kiss you, Ilia?” Weiss asked, holding herself back by one single shred of propriety.

“Yeah…”

Her lips were soft and full, almost blazingly warm as they pressed in closer to one another. Weiss started to guide Ilia closer to the bed as she parted her lips, letting in the tongue flitting at her as Ilia’s hands fastened to her waist. Real life, fever dream…she decided it didn’t matter. The warmth in her core was real enough.

They had to break for air eventually, but refused to move apart any more than was absolutely necessary. Ilia squeezed at Weiss’s waist, then relaxed her grip. “Can I touch you?” she asked, straining not to right then and there.

Weiss took Ilia’s hands and put them back in place. “Yes…I want you to.”

That was all she needed. One of Ilia’s hands tracked upward as they resumed their kiss, carefully avoiding the bloodied spot on her dress, and settled beneath the swell of one breast, while the other raced down beneath Weiss’s dress to her bare thigh. Weiss sighed and pushed into her touch. The strength in her legs was beginning to fail, so she made no protest when Ilia guided her down to the bed and devoted one hand to doing away with her shoes. When they clattered to the floor, Ilia reared up and pulled down a zipper on the side of her bodysuit so she could toss it aside. Her freckles extended all over, Weiss saw as she frantically set about getting rid of her dress. It was a little awkward while she was lying down, but so very worth the admiring look on Ilia’s face when she swept back down on Weiss.

“I’ve wanted to do this for way too long,” Ilia said, kissing along Weiss’s collarbone and down to the swells of her breasts, greedily swiping her tongue over each and every bit of skin she could get at. Weiss arched her back and pushed up toward Ilia’s mouth, reaching out to stroke her hair and watch it change color at her touch. Ilia kept moving down, lightly nipping at her stomach, until she pressed a kiss to the thin line of white hair between Weiss’s legs. Both of them sucked in a breath. “ _Way_ too long.”

Weiss gasped when Ilia circled her clit, running the soft, wet tip of her tongue over the sensitive skin. She whined and bit down on one hand as a jolt of pleasure raced up through her body, sending tingles out to her fingers and toes. Ilia’s hands tightened around her legs to hold her in place. Oh, if there was ever a way to celebrate still being alive…Ilia’s tongue moved in all sorts of shapes and directions, changing pace, changing pressure, working so diligently to eke out every reaction she could. Weiss was only too happy to oblige. Her muscles wound tight with each frenetic stroke until Ilia went at her with abandon, working into a frenzy as Weiss gasped for breath until it all dropped out underneath her. She shook and shivered and kicked out at the bedsheets as everything went slack, as Ilia kept gently lapping at her through the throes of her orgasm.

“Oh…oh, Ilia,” Weiss choked out, dazed, watching with half-lidded eyes as Ilia made sure to get every last drop of arousal. The quick, methodical swipes of her tongue made Weiss tremble, leaving a sweet ache in her body. Ilia’s hair curled around her finger. She eased back, lips shining until she licked them clean, then crawled atop Weiss to kiss at her throat. Weiss circled a finger around the nape of her neck, felt the warmth and the slight sheen of sweat there. “Now what can I do for you?”

“You almost died, there’s no need to rush or anything—”

“Hey, I’m not greedy! We would have swapped places already if…if my arms and legs didn’t feel like jelly right now,” Weiss said with an indignant blush.

Ilia smiled and rolled onto her side. “Lie back, then.”

She did so as Ilia sat up, pushing Weiss’s ponytail away before swinging one leg over Weiss’s head and straddling her face. The soft bronze tone of her skin gave over to a slightly pinker shade between her legs. Weiss loosely grasped Ilia’s hips and tugged her down, close enough to feel the warmth coming off her, close enough that the roll of her breath made Ilia shudder above her. She planted a kiss to Ilia’s clit and received an appreciative moan in response.

Her pace was a bit slower, but no less determined. Weiss ran her tongue in a wide circle, occasionally darting back to the center, while Ilia slumped forward and held onto the headboard for support, fingers digging into the wood as her hips rocked needfully. “ _Weiss_ ,” she breathed, the muscles in her abdomen flexing. Weiss tightened her grip and quickened her rhythm. Ilia opened her mouth again, but rather than words she could only get out another long, low moan. Her hips bucked forward, desperate for more stimulation, and the skin around her stomach and thighs began to shift through a gamut of colors. Weiss watched, fascinated by the smoothness as it blended together and grew to cover the rest of her body. Ilia yelped and tried to cover it up, but it quickly overmatched what she could conceal with her hands. “Don’t look at it…”

Whatever concerns she had fell apart as the rest of her body shifted rapidly through the rainbow, trembling against Weiss’s mouth until she came, crying out wordlessly and pressing her thighs to either side of Weiss’s head. Ilia went slack above her, grasping the headboard again to stay upright, panting and twitching as arousal, sharp and sweet, smeared across Weiss’s lips. She slid her tongue down to the source to press teasingly forward and got another needy moan for her efforts.

It took Ilia several minutes to get her color under control again, though she was blushing furiously when she finally swung her leg over Weiss’s head and settled next to her face-down on the bed. “Sorry, that doesn’t usually happen,” she said as she grabbed a pillow and buried the lower half of her face in it. “It’s just…been a while, I guess. And it felt so good.”

Weiss rolled closer to Ilia with what strength had returned and twined one leg up with Ilia’s. She pushed the pillow down and lightly touched one of the freckles on Ilia’s cheek. “Don’t apologize. You looked beautiful. You still do.”

“Flatterer.”

“I never flatter,” Weiss said seriously. She propped herself up on one elbow and leaned over to kiss at the ridges of Ilia’s spine between her shoulder blades. Her skin flashed red and blue everywhere Weiss’s lips landed. “If anything I’m unduly critical. Ask any of my teammates.”

“Then I’ll accept the high praise.”

She turned on her side to gaze at Weiss, eyes slightly unfocused, idly touching everything in easy reach—her shoulders, the hollow of her throat, the scar around her eye. Weiss cupped her cheek and kissed her once. “Are they going to give you grief if you sleep in tomorrow?” Ilia asked.

“I think I’ve earned a late morning. I _did_ almost die, after all.” Without getting up, Weiss maneuvered the sheets out from under their bodies and then kicked them back up over them.

“Well, I’m glad you didn’t, for the record.”

Ilia shifted a little closer, until they were pressed flush to one another, and buried her cheek in the crook of Weiss’s shoulder. Weiss wrapped an arm around her to hold her there.

“Me too.”


End file.
